He came back with a hoe. He was going to hoe the snake’s head off. Have you ever tried to hoe the head off a snake in the open, that is, where the snake has freedom of movement? It’s almost impossible, especially if there is porch furniture in the way. By this time Gretchen and Will were watching the proceedings from the safety of the kitchen, looking out over the Dutch door. But I was still out on the porch, also in the way.
So there we were. If this was the biblical struggle with evil, it had strong overtones of farce. Will, who had completely recovered his humor and was smiling broadly, spoke up. “Charles, it appears to me that if you succeed in killing this snake you no doubt will also make a mess of the furniture, not to mention the drinks. So in order to simplify the situation, why don’t you get a big shovel and shovel him out the door, and he will crawl back to the branch and halfway to the village before he stops for breath, if snakes breathe.” He was about to burst into laughter.
Up to this point, I was inclined toward killing, but at this speech, I converted and became vehement for clemency. Daddy wasn’t sure. He was still very frightened for my sake. But after a pause, when Gretchen said, “Oh, Charles, just get the creature out of here,” that is what we did. A scoop was gotten from the tool-shed and the snake cajoled into sliding across the high sill of the screen door. He went fast down hill toward the weeping willow in the front yard. As he crossed one of the willow’s big roots, a curious thing happened. In order to avoid a knob on the next root, he crawled back over himself, creating his last circle, I thought, for me. And he stopped for an instant, looking—if a snake looks—back toward us, all of us still full of the chill a snake brings with him. Then without a thought to the consequences, I blurted out, “That’s how I found him. I was walking in the creek. I felt him move under my foot. He was in circles like that. That’s all. I wasn’t sure which kind he was …” I trailed off to nothing, waiting for the lecture.
Instead, Will looked straight at me and asked, “Do you want to learn to serve at the altar, Charlie?” I caught my breath. Sometimes twelve-year-olds were allowed to light the candles and carry torches, but never serve at the altar. I wasn’t even confirmed.
But I had been closely watching Will and my father together at the altar in the early mornings, and I had heard the language of Cranmer and the King James Bible. And although the surface meaning of the words often escaped me, even then, I could hear the struggle toward God. I knew that beyond the farm and nature and the animals and Matthew and the other people I knew and loved, this was the center of their lives, and wondered without words whether it would become mine.
I already knew the danger of it. I’d felt the heaviness left sometimes after the last Gospel—after the words of St. John are repeated (“And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us … full of grace and truth”) and the response (“Thanks be to God)”— when my father walked from the church in front of Will, and I somehow knew that nothing had happened for him. I also knew that in that moment, at least, Christ was not “among us” for me either, and that all I was left with were the words, wondering, even then, if the words would ever be enough.
The next Lent when, at thirteen and confirmed, and knowing how to serve, I determined to keep what we called a good Lent. To go to church twice a week and, childlike, to try to get to the bottom of the mystery. Church was at seven. There was still plenty of time to catch the school bus after the service.
It had been an easy winter, not like the previous winters and certainly not like the Great Winter of the dog hunt. Even so, Lent was early that year and there was snow. My father was as usual away during the week on business, so I was the server at the seven o’clock celebrations of Communion, or what we, being High Church, called Mass.
One early morning I walked into the chancel in front of Will, who was carrying the veiled chalice, looked out to the nave of the church, and saw only one other person. So that morning in the cold church (they hadn’t yet installed central heating) there would be only the three of us—and the mystery and the words.
In a church procession the most important person comes last, until we come to the step and I move aside and Will goes into the sanctuary to arrange the veiled chalice and open the altar book. Then I kneel on the bare wooden floor, waiting, balanced. I can kneel for thirty-five minutes without feeling faint and have learned to keep my back straight, so my weight goes to my knees.
He returns to the foot of the sanctuary and stands while I remain kneeling, still tense, but cautiously hopeful. It is about to start. He begins, “In the name of the Father,” while making the sign of the cross. After we say the psalm, he turns to me, bowing, and says, “I confess to God Almighty, before the whole company of heaven, and to you …” Here he is to say “to you my brethren,” meaning everyone in the church.
But that morning, halfway into my first Lent, he made a mistake and said “to you my brother.” To me alone. And I felt a sudden warmth as if God himself had finally spoken to me; and for that moment the steady and inexorable loss of my world became bearable, even at thirteen.
Funerals are the reason I go back now. They seem to happen particularly in the winter, as the old people die off, and I come from wherever I happen to be. Each time I return, the road west from the town—now a city—is overlaid with more memory, like the layers of features on a new style map: topography, roads, towns, villages. Each layer is added on until it is all there—everything you could possibly want to know about the countryside and your own life—laid out in one case by modern science and, in the other, memory. Of course, the church has changed again and again. That is what they wanted, my father and Will—to take the little country brick church and make it a thing of small but rare beauty. They wanted it to have a large stone altar, a pipe organ, lots of vesting rooms, the modern-medieval windows. Those windows were made in Holland, and when they arrived at the village Will and my father were so excited that Daddy installed one of them himself instead of waiting for the experts. They were proud of themselves and the beauty of the window, until two weeks later the whole thing buckled and the experts barely saved it.
Each time I enter the church I look for the galvanized pulley still nailed into the rafters high above the nave, which my father put there in 1948 for the Christmas pageant. They tried to make the pageant a Broadway show with a stage. The pulley was to pull up the curtain. But my father only got as far as running a rope through it before Will jerked him back to reality and to the fact that it was a church and not a theater—curious for one of High Church persuasion. So no more theater—obviously not necessary to salvation. But the little galvanized pulley remained as a memory for me of my father and Will, a mark of their passing, hung high above the nave—having survived the latest remodeling and expansion—to hold up the curtain that time they all got so carried away over Christmas.
Until the last time. It was gone. The shock was physical. My gut tightened. Well, I suppose I always knew it would happen, knew that one day I would walk into the church for a funeral to discover that my little symbol for them was gone, that all that was left of the old church seemed to be the nave, somehow dwarfed by the rest: the choir loft and the little pipe organ my father spent so many hours on and the clear chancel. There is one other thing left: the reredos behind the altar, carved from oak stained black, with the wheat sheaves for the bread on one side of the cross and the grapes for the wine on the other. But as for the nave, the pine pews are too small, the wood too soft with too many scratches, too primitive. The next time the pews would be gone, too. I was sure. And as if to put it into some dusty archive in my mind, I looked across and back, thinking of the people who from custom used the same pew, year after year.
And then toward the back on the Gospel side, I saw him as clear as day. It was from a time when just the two of us were there, Will standing with his hands resting on the pew in front of him, smiling and then suddenly that laugh, a horse laugh I always called it. Being a kid, I had been shocked and had rebuked him. Laughter in church! He gave an
absolutely straight-faced answer: “This is God’s house and I’m at home here.” Then, in spite of everything, he smiled.
And at the smile the scene in my mind’s eye suddenly shifted back to the Sunday morning of the moccasin, with the snake turning back on himself to miss the root as he crawled away from us, me waiting for the lecture, and Will, smiling, asking me in his serious funny way if I wanted to learn to serve at the altar—and feeling the lurch of my heart at the unexpectedness of the thing. And me thinking—now, not then—that in spite of my inclination to symbolize, that that snake was not the ancient symbol, not the creature of the garden. No, just Agkistrodon piscivorus, the cottonmouth, the water moccasin, crawling quickly away after interrupting our Sunday morning. Just a snake, but dangerous, and not something to step on barefoot on any day, no matter how tight his circles or great your need to know.
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